Tuesday, December 28, 2010

You may remember a few days ago when I mentioned that we (the Brainwrap crew) had been interviewed about our puppet show Seth Martin & Friends. Today the article ran in the Herald Dispatch and I couldn't be more satisfied with it. It's a pretty lengthy write-up that paints a nice picture of our ambitions, past accomplishments, and how we came to be. I have to give a huge thanks to the author, Dave Lavender, for not only hanging out with us in our non-heated studio but also for taking the time to figure out what we're all about. Brainwrap has been mentioned in the paper a couple times before and we've learned that it's very easy for misinformation to slip through. Not that it's been a huge problem or anything, but it just makes it all the more apparent that Dave really is a fan of what we're doing and wanted to do our efforts justice. So thanks, Dave! You definitely did more homework than you needed to when writing about a bunch adults who play with puppets. It's nice to have a bit of the spotlight pointed in our direction in such a professional manner.

Sunday, December 26, 2010

Enjoy a Seth Martin & Friends Christmas! I made the graphic from the last post specifically for this short. I was happy to actually be on hand for this shoot, and as we were setting up the props we were lucky enough to be interviewed by Dave Lavender for an article that will soon appear in our local paper.

Friday, December 24, 2010

Thursday, December 23, 2010

Merry Christmas eve eve! The piece above was bit of a rush-job that I managed to squeeze into my busy holiday art schedule, and I'm glad I did. It was for an art contest judged by one of my favorite artists, J. Scott Campbell. The subject of the contest was "sexy fairytale character,"which is also the theme of Campbell's pinup calendars he's put out for the last two years. I had trouble coming up with a character that hasn't been done to death, so I settled on Tinkerbell when I decided that her small size and ability to fly would offer up some unique possibilities to create a fun image. I didn't win the contest, but there were a ton of entries to compete against and the winning drawing totally deserved it. Plus I'm really happy with the final piece, and I think it's something I would never have done if not for the contest.

Thursday, December 16, 2010

A wallpaper I put together some time ago just for fun. I wanted to do something that had sort of a simple and stylized look, and I also thought it would be cool to make one of those wallpapers that has shelves for you to "place" your icons on. Enjoy!

Wednesday, December 15, 2010

My friend Randall has brought to my attention that two of my shirts made IGN's 2010 Gamer Girl Gift Guide. It's quite an honor to be featured on a site like IGN with such a wide reach, especially for my women's apparel which is something I get a lot of requests to do more of. Speaking of IGN, does anyone else remember the early days of the internet when IGN was N64.com? I was probably in grade school, and it was a bare-bones site that only reviewed Nintendo 64 games. It's pretty crazy to think about how it grew from a site that looked like it was started by a teenager on a public library computer to the giant online presence it is today. Ah, internet memories.

Every once in a while I'll get some press that really makes me stop and think about how crazy it is that my artwork is getting noticed, and this is one of those times. I did a couple of drawings here on this drawing table I've had since I was a kid, sent them out through a cord plugged into the wall, and months later, through no further effort of my own, there is money being spent by a large company on professional models and photographers to produce the images of my designs you see here. It's a very, very odd thing to me when I really think about it, and I'm so lucky to have had my work pay off in so many interesting ways.

And for the obligatory plug, you can buy these shirts and many more here at my store!

Tuesday, December 14, 2010

These are drawings from my latest assignment for Front magazine, an article about playing up your lack of money to attract women. Is it too late to warn against the adult nature of these images? (Well, no more adult than you'll see on a thirty foot billboard in Times Square, anyway.) At any rate, you can see how this is a continuation of the "hot chick" theme I mentioned yesterday. The article isn't so much full of actual advice as it is jokes, and the direction I was given was to draw "extremely sexy" women with a guy who resmbles a typical Front reader, though somewhat more slovenly and homeless looking. In the first and second versions of these pieces the guy looked a whole lot like my friend Kyle, which was bit odd, but I was just following their description and reference photos as best I could. It looks a little less like him in the final, but it's no so different that he can't tell people it's him if he chooses.

Monday, December 13, 2010

Hello there! It's been a while, and I'm sorry for that. I've been busy with plenty of projects but most of them I can't yet post for various reasons, including Funnyordie.com having exclusive press rights to a show I'm involved in, and the fact that I'll be giving away some art as Christmas presents.

I've also been fortunate enough to have some down time which I used for a vacation to New York and various other video game related activities.

That being said, I have still been building a nice little backlog of posts. I may just have to lump some of them together and declare this "hot chick week," which will be nice for those of you who are into that sort of thing.

For starters, here's a Front magazine, now a couple issues old, that features the "sexy student stereotypes" piece I was commissioned to do:

I even made the spine of this one! (The little goth girl head)

And they reused my drawing of Jonah Hex from the "scars" illustration that I did for a previous issue:

This is kinda funny to me because Jonah was originally featured in a drawing with several more characters where he was much smaller, and it just so happens that he was the character I chose to hide my initials in. I do that in most of my work for Front because the pieces don't always have backgrounds, or the characters may be shifted around on the backgrounds for layout purposes, so if I signed the drawing in the corner it would likely get erased away. So now there's a giant "GB" on this full-page Jonah's belt buckle.